Tucson Opinion: State board must hold docs accountable for falsifying med records

Earlier this year, NBC Nightly News aired a report on the growing problem in our country of doctors falsifying medical records to cover up their malpractice or negligence. According to the report, very few doctors are ever held to account for their actions, despite the fact that it is a crime.

This news report was of particular interest to me because I had been experiencing this firsthand in my pursuit of such charges against a doctor who works in a Tucson ophthalmologist’s office and eye care center.

One avenue I pursued was to file a complaint with the Arizona State Board of Optometry, which is the licensing board for optometrists in our state. Unfortunately, in a hearing on April 2, they dismissed the case on a vote of 4-1.

In my opinion, however, their process was egregiously biased to favor the accused doctor, and I will lay out here my reasons for making that claim.

The first reason concerns the composition of the board. It is currently made up of five optometrists throughout the state. There are two other community-at-large positions that have been vacant for some time because Gov. Doug Ducey has not filled them.

These positions are vital to the fair functioning of the board because they bring broader viewpoints that are more likely to represent the interests of patients. So the fact that they are going unfilled automatically results in a built-in bias.

The second reason is that the patient is required to speak first in the hearing and is actually forbidden from speaking again. This means that the accused doctor has an opportunity to rebut what the patient says, but the patient has no opportunity to rebut what the doctor says.

Making this situation worse is that the accused doctor receives the written complaint of the patient that outlines the points he or she will make at the hearing, but the patient does not receive the written statement of the doctor.

This obviously puts the patient as a disadvantage going into the hearing — and is especially problematic because (as described above) the patient has no opportunity to even respond after the doctor speaks.

In my case, this left me completely undercut when the doctor’s legal counsel presented an audit that the accused doctor did of himself that ostensibly proved his innocence. Because I was forbidden to speak, I wasn’t even allowed to respond in a general way about how this self-audit should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

My final reason for believing the process was biased concerns this very point. The board used this audit as justification for dismissing the case, despite the fact that evidence contained in my medical records was in direct opposition to what the audit said.

The question before them was were they going to believe the evidence contained in my records or this self-audit created by the accused doctor — and they chose the latter. And to be perfectly clear, the decision being made at this point wasn’t about whether to remove his license — it was simply about whether to investigate it further or not.

So with no investigation whatsoever, they chose to dismiss the charges. According to the NBC report mentioned above, a forensics expert is actually needed to definitively determine if fraud has occurred. A mere audit is not enough — particularly one done by the accused doctor.

If licensing boards like this could get to the place where they offer fair and balanced consideration of the cases brought before them, it would be a major step forward in helping patients bring doctors to justice. Falsifying medical records, after all, is not a victimless crime, and patients should have the right to hold these doctors accountable.